Shii News – Academic Items

1.AIS (Association for Iranian Studies) 2020 Conference is Cancelled, But Plans to Reschedule are Underway

“Were you thinking that you needed more time to get that conference paper ready? Well, we got you covered.

For the past few weeks, AIS Executive Committee has been making contingency plans in the event that the COVID 19 pandemic made cancellation necessary. After consultations with our Conference Chair, Miguel Angel Andres Toledo, it is time to implement those plans.

Here is what you need to know now:

1) The AIS Conference scheduled for August 25-28, 2020 is cancelled.

2) Registration fees for AIS 2020 will be honored at the next conference.

3) The rescheduled conference will be at the University of Salamanca, Spain.

4) Awardees will be announced this year, but we’ll celebrate properly at the rescheduled conference.

It is still too soon for us to offer the precise dates for the rescheduled conference. We will advise on that as soon as possible. But, let us assure you of something: the registration fee you have paid will be honored at the next conference you are able to attend. So, if, for some reason, you cannot make the rescheduled conference, you can apply your registration to the next conference.

In the coming weeks, in addition to working on rescheduling the conference, we will be studying ways to support Iranian Studies activity in the near term. I hope to present those initiatives to you soon.

For those of you who were looking forward to an AIS conference in Spain, as I most certainly was, the good news is that we can still look forward to it. Our conference will come.

In the meantime, I know every single one of you is working extra hard to support your students, your communities, and your families through this crisis. In the midst of all that, academic study – even of something so dear to us as Iranian Studies in all its forms – may seem like a misplaced priority. But that is not so. History is so often the miserable tale of disasters and suffering. But, it also the story of people like you who reclaim our common humanity with every act of learning.

I look forward to hearing about your scholarly accomplishments during this difficult time, in person; and I will. So, stay well in the meantime.

Cam Amin

AIS President

 

 

 

 

2. Notice of a website (Atelier Ideas & Research) that curates an on-going list of digital map collections: https://www.air4edu.com/. 

There have been three episodes dropped so far to create a census of digital collections of maps / globes / atlasses, with a few more archives across the world:  https://www.air4edu.com/academic-life/maps-globes-and-plans-an-ongoing-census-of-free-digital-archives-3/

 

 

 

 

3. CFP: Online Symposium on “Epidemic Urbanism: Reflections on History”

 

Epidemic illnesses—not only a product of biology, but also social and cultural phenomena—are as old as cities themselves. The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has put into perspective the impact of epidemic illness on urban life, and exposed the vulnerabilities of the societies it ravages as much as the bodies it infects. How can epidemics help us understand urban environments? What insights from the outbreak, experience, and response to previous urban epidemics might inform our understanding of COVID-19?

 

These questions in mind, we are organizing an online symposium in May 2020 to bring together academics from a range of disciplines to present case studies from across the globe to demonstrate how cities in particular are not just the primary place of exposure and quarantine, but also the site and instrument of intervention. Presentations will be informal, brief (7-10 minutes), and illustrated with 2-4 slides.

 

We welcome presentations on a range of illnesses and epidemics, geographies, time periods, urban interventions, observations on the impact of these epidemics on society and urban life, and insights to understand, critique, or complexify the conception of and response to COVID-19.

 

Each presentation should tell the story of a city, an outbreak of illness, and the city’s response to the epidemic. For example:

• What notable interventions or actions were implemented? With what effect?
• What impact did the epidemic have on urbanism, urban design, and urban planning?
• What impact did the epidemic have on architecture in the short and long term?
• What impact did the built environment have on the epidemic, or the experience of illness?

Our goal is to create a venue to use history as a medium to provide a better understanding of the current crisis.  Especially welcome are proposals by historians, public health experts, art/architectural historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and medical experts. The proposals should address the following:

 

• The idea of an epidemic or widespread illness in the geographical context you study;
• The employment of urban design, architecture, landscape, and/or experience in response to the illness or the epidemic;
• The insight(s) your case study can offer to understanding today’s COVID-19 pandemic and response.

 

Proposals can be sent to Dr. Mohammad Gharipour, Morgan State University (mohammad@gatech.edu) and Dr. Caitlin DeClercq, Columbia University (cd3100@columbia.edu) by April 10, in 200-250 words.  After proposals are reviewed, the symposium organizers will coordinate with accepted presenters to finalize a date and time for this event.

 

 

 

 

4. International Doctoral Conference in Religious Studies: “Resistance to Order and Authority in Religion“, Central European University, Budapest, 25-27 June 2020

The conference invites contributions studying the conceptualization, management and instrumentalization of religious ideas and beliefs with regard to past and contemporary resistance movements.

Information: https://religion.ceu.edu/crs-elte-masaryk-phd-conference-25-27-june-2020

 

 

 

 

5. 15^th International Congress of Ottoman Social and Economic History (ICOSEH), University of Zagreb, 13-17 July 2020

The Congress will address various aspects of the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire as well as any aspects of the Ottomans and the Mediterranean and the Ottomans and Central Europe.

Information: https://networks.h-net.org/node/11419/discussions/4222924/icoseh-zagreb-2020-cfp

 

 

 

 

6. Workshop: “Trembling and Inundation: Natural Disasters in the History and Culture of West Asia and North Africa”, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, 8 September 2020

What happens to our understandings of histories, societies and cultural production when human activity is interrupted by earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, droughts and plagues? What do these mighty forces, impacting on all, irrespective of social position, but experienced differently according to it, tell us about societies? This workshop is intended to facilitate intensive discussion with the aim of producing a published collection.

Information: https://sarahirving0.wixsite.com/tremblingsinundation

 

 

 

7. 27^th International Congress of the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation (DAVO), University of Osnabrück, 24-26 September 2020

Papers are invited in social sciences and humanities related to the Middle East, North Africa and the entire Islamic World.

Deadline for abstracts of papers and closed panels: 15 July 2020.

Information: https://www.iit.uos.de/davo2020 (click on English version).

 

 

 

 

8. Meeting of the European Network for the Study of Islam and Esotericism (ENSIE): “Islamic Esotericism in Global Contexts”, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, 24-26 September 2020

The aim is to consider the relationship between Islam and esotericism, and Islamic esotericism, in a global context, shifting the emphasis not only from Western perspectives, but also being more inclusive of the experience of Islam beyond the Arabo-Persian domains.

Deadline for submissions: 1 May 2020. Information: http://ensie.site/conferences.html

 

 

 

 

9. Summer School: “Cultural Encounters and Ibadi Theological Developments” and Workshop: “Assessing the Study of Early Ibadi Sources: Methodologies, Developments and Perspectives”, University of Tuebingen, 7-11 September 2020

The Summer School will focus on text studies (early sources) bearing on the emergence and early development of Ibadi theological thinking within the culturally and religiously multifaceted context and spectrum of Early Islam. The workshop is intended to pay tribute to the contribution which Professor van Ess made to research and study particularly on Early Ibadi sources.

Deadline for abstracts: 19 May 2020. Information: https://ibadistudies.org/index.php/summer-school/37-application-details-for-the-2nd-summer-school

 

 

 

 

10. Articles on “Constructing Islam: Politization of Muslim Identity in the Contemporary World“ for Special Issue of “Islamology – Journal for Studies of Islam and Muslim Societies”

Authors are invited to examine the phenomenon of politicization of Muslim identity: on the one hand, what image is being shaped in different sectors of public space? and, on the other hand, how does the Muslim community react to the set frames? In what cases and why does a certain community position itself as ‘Muslim’?

Deadline for abstracts: 1 June 2020. Information: https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6074071/special-issue-constructing-islam-politization-muslim-identity

 

 

 

 

11. Articles on “Religious Transformation in the Middle East – Spirituality, Religious Doubt, and Non-religion” for Special Edition of Journal “Religions”

This Special Issue looks to compose a cross section of current work in social science, religious studies, and related fields on Islam/religion and non-religion in the Arab World. It aims at collecting case studies that offer carefully contextualized explorations, grounded in theoretically informed analyses.

Deadline for manuscripts: 1 December 2020.

Information: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/Religious_Arab

 

 

 

 

12. Articles for “CyberOrient – Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East and Islamic World”

The peer-reviewed and open-access journal of the American Anthropological Association is devoted to research on the impact of cyberspace and its representation on the Middle East, North Africa and wider Islamic world in Asia.

Deadline for articles: 1 June 2020. Information: https://cyberorient.net

 

 

 

13. University of Pennsylvania Press e-books available for free download through 30 June 2020

Link to the main Penn Press search page: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/catalog.html. Note: for most of its books, Penn Press doesn’t sell the e-book directly. For that, you have to go to its “Partners” page (https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/about/ebooks.html). One can find material, for example, through the University Press Content Consortium page.

 

 

 

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